HHS: Why, no, we are not measuring the very metric ObamaCare was passed to improve

posted at 8:31 pm on March 6, 2014 by Mary Katharine Ham

Allahpundit mentioned this in his earlier post, but I just want to emphasize it.

The federal government is not even measuring the very number ObamaCare was created to bring down. How many times did we hear 47 million uninsured? How many times did we hear it was necessary to pass a huge revamp of the entire system to insure them? Later we heard the prediction for how many of those 47 million we’ll actually insure is quite underwhelming. Now, we ask: Hey, how many of the uninsured are we actually insuring?

There is no clearer dereliction of duty for this law. They created an irresponsible reform behemoth, they failed to implement it responsibly, they spent irresponsible amounts of money building a bunch of exchanges that don’t work, and now they’re not even responsible enough to bother checking how much help or damage they’ve done with the most straightforward metric available.

They don’t care about how much of your money they spend and they don’t care about figuring out if they’re helping people with that money because they might have to admit to not caring about how much of your money they spend. This is why having government tackle complicated problems can be a problem in and of itself.

There’s a lot we don’t know about how Obamacare enrollment is going. Apparently that’s also true even within the Obama administration.

Gary Cohen, the soon-to-be-former director of the main implementation office at the Health and Human Services Department, stopped by an insurance industry conference Thursday to offer an update on enrollment. The main points were familiar: People are signing up (about 4 million have picked a plan so far), and the administration is going all out to promote Obamacare over the last few weeks of the enrollment window.

But Cohen didn’t have much more to offer insurers—who need this to work just as much as the White House—on some of the biggest unknowns about the law’s progress:

How many uninsured people are signing up?

The Congressional Budget Office estimates that the health care law will reduce the number of uninsured people by about 24 million over the next few years, and that about 6 million previously uninsured people will gain coverage through the law’s exchanges this year. So, is enrollment on track to meet that goal? Overall enrollment is looking pretty decent, but how many of the people who have signed up were previously uninsured?

“That’s not a data point that we are really collecting in any sort of systematic way,” Cohen told the insurance-industry crowd on Thursday when asked how many of the roughly 4 million enrollees were previously uninsured.

New York state is collecting that data, and it says about 70 percent of its enrollees were not covered before, while about 30 percent are changing their coverage rather than gaining it.

How many people signed up directly with insurers?

When HealthCare.gov was broken in October and November, HHS and insurers agreed on “direct enrollment” as a workaround—encouraging people to sign up directly with insurance companies. It’s also an option for people who are too wealthy to get a subsidy to help cover their premiums (the main benefit of using the exchanges), or who had a plan canceled and want to stick with the same carrier. Cohen was asked Thursday how many people have signed up outside the exchanges.

“I don’t think we have done anything to try to collect that sort of data,” he said.

This is the law’s purported raison detre, as we were told countless times. But they can’t even be bothered to count. It’s easier to claim you’re helping people when you refuse to collect data that might say otherwise.

This afternoon, an estimate was given on the radio that there will be about 45 million uninsured Americans by the end of this year. So all this fuss may have succeeded in reducing the number of uninsured from 47 to 45 million. Great job.

They don’t care about the uninsured number, it was just a hammer used to drive through the piece of crap Obamacare. Ditto their fake concern over bankruptcies, preexisting conditions, etc, etc.

All of their issues used for pounding through the piece of crap are now exacerbated by Obamacare. Still, they don’t care because the takeover of healthcare has been an objective of the socialists for 100 years.

Well, if the evil conservatives and GOP would just stop being obstructionist, Obama, with pen and phone in hand, could fix all the glitches and everything would work perfectly, so there would be no need to monitor the obvious gains in insured uninsured, and we would all be equal and get safe, government approved abortions and contraception for free. And we can’t yet, because of the evil GOP and the devils from hell Tea Baggers.

An Ass masquerading as a President once found a Doctor’s white lab coat which had been left out in the sun to dry. He put it on and spoke to his countrymen. All bowed, both men and women, and he was a proud Ass that day. In his delight he lifted up his voice and brayed treatments and prescriptions and timetables and qualifications randomly and incoherently and unleashed mindless bureaucrat 404 zombies upon the land to look for trouble, find it everywhere, diagnose everything incorrectly and then in a very grouchy and slow manner misapply all the wrong remedies, and then everyone knew him for the Ass he really was.

These are the masters of ballot box-stuffing we’re talking about here, and they can’t even come up with a “fake but accurate” number? Come some timeframe milestone would any of us be surprised if they were to find stacks upon stacks of unprocessed Obamacare applications in the trunk of a car sitting in long-term parking at LAX?

It must be frustrating for the regime to have to admit that most of the signeruppers are headed to medicaid and the ones who do signup not on medicaid are costly to insure either uninsureable before or getting massive funding from the govt.–us in essence.
the entire thing is a scam designed to further destroy the country the longer it exists.

An Ass masquerading as a President once found a Doctor’s white lab coat which had been left out in the sun to dry. He put it on and spoke to his countrymen. All bowed, both men and women, and he was a proud Ass that day. In his delight he lifted up his voice and brayed treatments and prescriptions and timetables and qualifications randomly and incoherently and unleashed mindless bureaucrat 404 zombies upon the land to look for trouble, find it everywhere, diagnose everything incorrectly and then in a very grouchy and slow manner misapply all the wrong remedies, and then everyone knew him for the Ass he really was.

Cheshire Cat on March 6, 2014 at 8:39 PM

Sounds a lot like “The Last Battle”, the last of C.S. Lewis’ novels on the imaginary world of Narnia. In that novel, an Ass is dressed in a lion skin, until the real lion returns to claim his kingdom.

What people need to understand about Obama and all those who designed or worked on ObamaCare in the Administration, Congress, and media, is that they are liberals.

Mere “data points” are just “details” that don’t matter. They could have worked a little harder to get you a number, but it would be “just a number” and of no significance, and they already worked really really hard thinking of the ObamaCare plan and dreaming of all the good it would do.

For liberals, the results and effects of their policies are irrelevant. All that counts is their intentions, which were good and pure as snow – just ask them.

Only an inept, corrupt moron would create a program that destroys an existing System, replaces it with another, and has no way to measure it’s success or failure….oh wait – I just described ‘Common Core’…

Another missing statistic/prediction: How much revenue via IRS TAX COMPLIANCE was predicated on Obamacare?

No mention has been made of the carrot and stick of Obamacare for those CASH ECONOMY citizens who have heretofore bought health coverage but shorted the IRS. Now they must register or face fines…and pay up.